- Fan-Disliked Explanation: The original plan for the Booster Gold/Skeets subplot involved fixing the timestream, which had become broken during the recent crisis, and this is hinted at by the discrepancies in Skeets' history files starting in the first issue. However, the writers eventually decided that this plot was too generic and had been done far too often with other time traveling heroes, so they instead had Skeets possessed by Mr. Mind who planned to eat reality. However, with this shift, they never do get around to explaining why Skeets has these initial memory errors, since they occurred before Mr. Mind had ever left the cocoon.
- In general, this series was intended to explain a lot of things that were depicted in DC's concurrent "One Year Later" event, in which DC's books took up the story exactly one year after Infinite Crisis to show that many things had occurred differently. However, the writers of 52 ended up ignoring a lot of these in favour of their own stories, meaning that some of these (such as, in Batman comics, the events that saw Commissioner Gordon re-instated and his successor resign in disgrace) were never explained.
- Franchise Original Sin: The original intent of 52 was to fill readers in with what had happened after the year-long time skip in-universe after the events of Infinite Crisis from the perspective of secondary characters, but it was overtaken by the stories about those characters; this led to DC to publish a few tie-in books that covered the more well-known characters, which sold well. It wasn't a problem here, because there weren't that many (there were only 4), they were relatively self-contained, and they were made because of unintentional consequences, but then came Countdown to Final Crisis (which intentionally set up plot points in the main story and only had them resolved in tie-ins, as well as having both multiple tie-in stories and entire tie-in series, and tied in to a ton of what was going on at the time), and Final Crisis (which wasn't as bad as Countdown, but introduced the final villain of Final Crisis in the Superman Beyond tie-in)note .
- Growing the Beard: Could be seen as this for several of the main characters, such as Will Magnus and (with a literal beard) Ralph Dibny.
- Memetic Mutation: Three panels of Will Magnus looking at a page of "machine code" has been photoshopped in a bunch of funny ways
. - Narm:
- By the writers own admission, their original plans for killing Booster Gold came off as hilarious instead of traumatic and they had to rewrite the scene several times in order to arrive at a scenario that had both the impact and the solemnity they wanted.
- An organization called "the Religion of Crime" that has a text called a "Crime Bible" is perhaps hard to take seriously. Like the above, even the comics' writers make fun of this in the author's notes of the Trade Paperback, with Mark Waid lamenting he didn't come up with a cooler name like "The Way Of Sin."
- Strawman Has a Point: The Natasha Irons/John Henry split was written with the intention for both sides to have legitimate points that each would realize over the course of the series, but when a page was re-drawn to display more cleavage it actually derailed the writers' plans. The scene, which featured Natasha welding her own suit of armor, was scripted as her wearing full welding gear as a standard safety precaution. When she was drawn without the gear (so that a close-up could focus on her chest), she burned herself when she struck an air pocket. This small change made her somebody who really was unprepared for the responsibility of Powered Armor, since she did not even have the forethought to take proper precautions in the controlled environment of a lab. The authors were not happy with this change, as they felt it undermined a large part of the story.
- Take That, Scrappy!: Osiris' death for those who didn't see it as an Alas, Poor Scrappy moment (such as Keith Giffen).
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite the Justice Society of America being openly disgusted by Lex Luthor's graverobbing to create a new Infinity Inc., and their confrontation with the team when the new Jade is revealed, they're nowhere to be found when Steel and the Teen Titans finally make a move against Luthor. You'd think they would've taken an active interest in stopping Luthor and dismantling his little group.
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